Chapter I: SEE (1)

A man came up to me for flight test once when I was an inspector for the Department of Commerce. He flew terribly, so I sent him away and told him to come back in a couple of weeks, after he had practiced a little more. He came back a couple of weeks later, and I turned him down again.

The third time he came in he said, "I think we'll get along all right this time. Can I take the test today?"

"I'm too busy today," I told him. But he pleaded so hard that I finally said, "All right, I'll squeeze you in this afternoon. Come at three o'clock."

"Thank you, thank you," he said, and held out his hand.

I reached out my hand to grip his and felt something in my palm. I pulled my hand away and found a piece of paper in it. I unfolded it and discovered a ten-dollar bill.

I stood there and looked at it, puzzled and amazed for a few seconds. Then the full import of it dawned on me. He thought I had been holding out for something. He thought he would fix me up. He didn't know he could never fix me up if I put my stamp of approval on him when he was unfit and he should then go out and kill some passenger because of my leniency.

It started at the top of my head, that raging anger. It burned like flaming coals and raced through my veins like fire. I began to tremble violently, and when I looked up the man was a red flame in a red room.

I hurled the paper bill at him as though it were a javelin and shouted, "Get out! Get out and don't ever come back!"

Have you ever thrown a piece of paper at anybody?

The bill fluttered ineffectually down to the floor halfway between us. I rushed at it and kicked at it until it was out of the door. I kicked him out too.

I wondered, sitting at my desk afterward, why I had got so mad. It wasn't honesty. I hadn't had time to think of honesty. I wondered if it was because he had implied that I was worth ten dollars. I wondered what I would have done if he had offered me ten thousand dollars. I began to understand graft.

WON ARGUMENT LOST

"That student is dangerous. You're crazy if you fly with him again," I harangued my friend, Brooks Wilson.

"Don't be that way," Brooks answered. "He's not dangerous. He's goofy."

"That's why he's dangerous," I countered. "You tell me that he froze the controls in a panic today and you lost a thousand feet of altitude before you were able to get the ship away from him. The next time you may not have a thousand feet."

"I won't need a thousand feet the next time," Brooks argued. "I wrestled the controls away from him today, but the next time he grabs them like that, I'll just beat him over the head with the fire extinguisher and knock him out."

"If you are high enough to do that, you won't be in any danger," I pointed out. "And if you are low enough to be in danger when he freezes, you won't have time to knock him out."

Brooks and I were both very young army instructors, and Brooks was stubborn with the confidence of youth. He only growled, "Don't be a sissy all your life. I can handle this guy."

The next day a solo student spun in, in a field of corn beside the airport. Brooks had just landed with his goofy student and was crawling out of his cockpit when he saw the ship hit. He jumped back into his cockpit, gave his still idling motor the gun and took off, his goofy student still in the rear seat.

He flew over the wreck, circled it, dove on it, pulled up, wing-it, dove on it, pulled up, wing-overed, and dove on it again. He was a beautiful pilot. He was pointing out to the ambulance where the wreck was in the tall corn. He pulled up and started another wing-over, flipped suddenly over on his back, and spun in right beside the wreck.

When they pulled Brooks out of his wreck he was unconscious but was muttering over and over again in his Southern vernacular, "Turn 'em loose. Turn 'em loose. Turn 'em loose before we crash."

The goofy student was hardly even scratched. Brooks died that night.

MONK HUNTER

Monk Hunter was a dashing aviator, the only really dashing aviator I have ever known. There was dash to the cut and fit of his uniforms, dash to the shine and the fit of his boots, dash to the twirl and flip of the cane he carried. There was dash to the set of his magnificently erect and darkly handsome head, dash in the flare of his nostrils and the gleam of his flashing black eyes, dash in his violently dynamic gestures and in his torrential, staccatoed, highly inflected speech which he aimed at you as he had aimed machine guns at enemy flyers during the war when he had shot down nine of them.

There was especial dash to Monk's mustache. Only Monk could have worn that mustache. I saw him once without it, and something seemed to have gone out of him as it went out of Samson when they clipped his hair. He looked naked and helpless.

It was a big mustache, the kind you see in tintypes of swains of long ago. It bristled, and Monk had a way about him in twirling it that you should have seen.

Poor Monk took off at Selfridge one day in an army pursuit ship. He even did that with dash. He held it low after the take-off and then started a clean, left, sweeping climb into the blue sky.

We all saw the white smoke start trailing out behind his ship. Then with bated breath we watched the ship slump slowly over from its gestured climbing and nose straight down inexorably toward the ice of Lake St. Clair. Monk's chute blossomed out behind the diving ship just before it disappeared behind the trees.

We all jumped into cars and rushed madly over to where we thought it had hit. We found Monk, unhurt, except for the jar from landing on the ice, waving his arms, wildly shouting that the ship had caught fire and to look what the damned thing had done. We looked at the ship, but Monk was still gesticulating excitedly, so we looked at him. He meant to look what it had done to him.

We all started laughing like hell. We were really laughing with Monk, not at him. He appreciated it, too.

His mustache had been burnt clear off on one side.

COULDN'T TAKE IT

I was testing an airplane one day. Its wings came off, and I jumped out in my chute. I am convinced that the people on the ground watching me got a bigger thrill out of it than I did. I was too busy.

For one thing, Admiral Moffett, who was later killed in the _Akron_, rushed home to his office in an emotional fit and wrote me a very nice letter about what a hero I was. I wasn't any hero. I had just been saving my neck.

And for another, my mechanic came up to see me in the hospital right afterward. I wasn't in the hospital because I was hurt, but because the military doctor on the post made me go there. After I had got into the hospital I discovered that my heart was beating so violently that I couldn't sleep, so when Eddie, my mechanic, came up they let him in.

He didn't say anything at all for a while. He just sat on the bed opposite mine and twirled his cap, looking down at the floor. Finally he said, "When your chute opened, I fell down."

I pictured him running madly across the field, watching me falling before I had opened my chute, and then stumbling just as my chute opened. "Why didn't you watch where you were going?" I said banteringly.

He kept looking at the floor, twirling his cap, his face expressionless. "I wasn't going any place," he said.

The conversation wasn't making much sense to me. "Didn't you say that when my chute opened, you fell down?" I asked.

"Yes," he said, as if he were talking to the floor. He was in a sort of trance.

"Well," I said, puzzled, "then you must have been running across the field watching me. You must have stumbled and fallen."

"No," he said, like a man in a dream, "I didn't stumble on anything. I was just standing there looking up, watching you."

I was getting frantic. "Well, how in the hell did you fall down, then?" I asked.

"My knees collapsed," he said.

GOOD LUCK

Soon now, he would be flying out over the ocean. Soon he would be famous and rich. Lindbergh had made it. Why shouldn't he?

His ship was almost ready. Its belly bulged with new tanks. Its wings stretched with new width to take the added gas load. Its motor emitted a perfect sound that his trained ears could find no fault with.

Only the final adjusting of his instruments remained. Lindbergh had taken great pains with his instruments. He would too. When the ground crew had finished with them, he flew his ship on a short cross-country trip to check the instruments in flight. They worked fine.

He brought his ship down to put it in the hangar until he got his break in weather. He lingered in the cockpit for a few moments, contemplating his instruments in anticipation of the weary hours he would have to watch them during the long flight.

A thought occurred to him. Lindbergh had been lucky. He would be too. His girl (sweet kid--maybe when he came back ... but he would do the job first) had already wished him luck. She had given him a token of her wish. It was only a cheap thing she had picked up in some novelty shop, but he treasured it. He took it out of his pocket. He tied it to the instrument board and fashioned its bright red ribbon into a neat bow knot that reminded him of the way she fastened her apron when she made coffee for him in her kitchen late at night. There. Yes, he too would have luck now.

Several days later his break in the weather hadn't come yet. He got worried about his instruments. There were no landmarks in the ocean. Maybe he had better check his compass again.

He went out to the field and flew his ship. The compass was off! It was way off! When the ground crew checked it again it was off twenty degrees on the first reading.

They soon found the trouble. As everybody knows, metal near a compass will throw it off. They found a metal imitation of a rabbit's foot suspended on a red ribbon tied to the bottom of the compass case.

WILL ROGERS IN THE AIR

I was flying as a passenger on one of the airlines once, going out to Wichita to take delivery of a ship I had sold. Will Rogers was a passenger on the same ship.

When we stopped at Columbus, I managed to engage Rogers in conversation. I had always been curious about whether he talked in private life as he does on the stage and radio, and if the poor grammar in his writing was deliberate or natural. He talked to me exactly as he does on the stage and radio, and his grammar was just as bad as it is in his writing. So I decided that, if it was an act, he was carrying it pretty far.

I noticed that he made certain movements with difficulty. He seemed to be crippled up a little. I asked him what was the matter. He said he had fallen off his horse before he left California and had broken a couple of ribs. I thought that was kind of funny, because I had always supposed he was a good horseman. I told him that, and he said it was a new horse and he wasn't used to it. I still thought it was kind of funny, but I let it pass.

I managed to bring out a little later in the conversation that I was a professional pilot myself and that being a passenger was a rare experience for me. He said he could tell me the truth then. He said he really had had an airplane accident the day before. An airliner he had been riding in had made a forced landing, had nosed over pretty hard, and had banged him up a little. That's how he had broken his ribs.

He said it hadn't been the pilot's fault that they had cracked up, that the motor had quit, and that the pilot had done a good job considering the country he had to sit down in. He said that only a good pilot could have kept from killing everybody in the ship, and that he was the only one who had been hurt.

He said he had told me that story about the horse in the first place because he thought I was a regular passenger. He said not to tell any of the rest of the passengers, because it might scare them and spoil their trip.

HE NEVER KNEW

Pilots often play jokes on each other when they fly together.

Two pilots I knew at Kelly Field had been up to Dallas on a week-end cross-country trip. They started back on a very rough day and were bouncing all around the sky.

About fifty miles out of San Antonio, the pilot who was flying the ship turned around to ask the other one in the rear seat for some matches. He couldn't see him, so he figured he was slumped down in the cockpit, napping. He looked back under his arm inside the fuselage. The rear cockpit was empty!

He was only flying at about five hundred feet, hadn't been flying any higher than that on the whole trip, and at times had been flying even lower.

Scared to death that his passenger had loosened his belt to stretch out and sleep and had been thrown out of the cockpit in a bump, perhaps even failing to recognize his predicament in time to open his chute, the pilot swung back on his course and started searching the route he had covered for signs of a body. He searched back over as much of it as he dared and still have enough gas left to turn around again and go on into Kelly Field.

He found nothing and was worried sick all the way back to Kelly. But when he landed, there was the other pilot, grinning a greeting at him.

The pilot who had been in the rear seat explained that he had undone his belt to stretch out and sleep and that the next thing he knew he felt a bump and woke up with a start to discover the cockpit about four feet beneath him and off to one side. He said he reached, but only grabbed thin air. The tail surfaces passed by under him, and he saw the airplane flying off without him.

He was too astounded at first, but quickly realized he ought to do something, sitting out there in space with no airplane or anything, so he pulled his rip cord. His chute opened just in time.

He walked over to the main road he had been flying over so recently and thumbed himself a ride to Kelly Field. He said he had seen the ship turn around and start back looking for him.

The pilot who had been flying the ship never knew if the other one had really fallen out of the ship, or if he had jumped out as a joke.

BONNY'S DREAM

Bonny had a dream. His inventor's eyes gleamed with the light of it. His days lived with the hope of it. His nights moved with its vision.

Because of his dream we called him Bonny Gull. He dreamed of building an airplane with metal, wood and fabric to emulate the sinewed, feathered grace of a soaring gull.

He studied gulls. He studied them dead and alive. He studied their wonderful soaring flight alive. He killed them and studied their lifeless wings. He wanted their secret. He wanted to recreate it for man.

He might have asked God. He might have asked God and heard a still small voice answer: "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's. Render unto man his own flight and leave to the gulls their own. Man's flight is different because his destiny is different. He doesn't need the gulls' flight."

But Bonny envied the gulls. He killed hundreds of them, yes, thousands, and buried them in the field. He built an airplane from what he thought he had learned from their dead bodies.

He built an airplane and took it out to fly. Engineers, who had never studied gulls but who had studied man's flight, told him he shouldn't do it. They pointed out to him how the center of pressure would shift on his wings. But Bonny glared his glittering faith at them, snuggled his dream in close, and flew.

He took off all right. He roared across the field, and if he didn't sound quite like a gull, he looked the part. He rose into the air for all the world like a giant gull. He pulled off in a steep climb, and the wise men wondered if again they were proved wrong by an ignorant fanatic.

Their wonder didn't last long. When Bonny tried to level out, he nosed over and dove straight into the ground, like a gull diving into the ocean for a fish. We rushed out to the wreck. Bonny was quite dead. There was scattered around him not only the remains of his own gull wings, but thousands of the feathered remains of other gull wings. He had dived straight into the shallow grave of all the gulls he had killed.

COB-PIPE HAZARDS

Silly little things are apt to crack you up sometimes.

I did an outside loop at Akron once. I came up over the top of the loop and started right down into another. I didn't want to do another, so I pulled back on the stick to stop it. It wouldn't come all the way back. It was jammed some way.

The ship was nosing steeper and steeper into the dive. I rolled the stabilizer, and that enabled me to pull the nose up. I couldn't keep it up if I cut the gun more than halfway. I knew I would have a tough time landing like that. Besides, although I had a chute, I knew that when I got down low to make a landing the stick might jam even farther forward and nose me in before I had a chance to jump. Or the engine might quit down low and do the same thing. It wasn't my ship, however, and I didn't want to jump and throw it away if I didn't absolutely have to.

I tried the stick a few more times. Each time I yanked it back hard it came up against the same obstacle at the same point. I decided to take a chance that it would stay jammed where it was.

I came in low 'way back of the field with almost all of the back travel of the stick taken up, holding the nose up with the gun. I had to land with the tail up high, going fast. I bounced wildly, used all the field, but made it all right.

I made an immediate inspection to find out what had jammed the stick. I couldn't imagine what it was because I had taken all the loose gadgets out of the ship before I had gone up.

I found a corncob pipe that the ship's owner had been looking for for weeks. He had left it in the baggage compartment and had never been able to find it. It had slipped through a small opening at the top of the rear wall of the compartment and had evidently been floating around in the tail of the fuselage all that time.

When I did the outside loop it had been flung upward by centrifugal force and wedged into the wedge ending of the upper longerons at the end of the fuselage. The flipper horn was hitting it every time I pulled the stick back, preventing me from getting the full backward movement.

Only the bowl of the pipe was left. It was lodged sidewise. Had it lodged endwise it would have jammed the stick even farther forward, and I would have had to jump or dive in with the ship. I would have had to jump quickly, too, because I didn't have much altitude when I started that second involuntary outside loop.

WHOOPEE!

A friend of mine was once chased and rammed in midair by a drunken pilot. If you have ever been approached on the road by a drunken driver you have some idea of the predicament he found himself in when this drunk started chasing him. Of course, he didn't know this guy was drunk, but he knew he was either drunk or crazy.

My friend was an army pilot. He was flying an army pursuit ship from Selfridge Field, Mich., to Chicago and was circling the field at Chicago preparatory to landing when he was set upon by the drunk, who, evidently still living in the memory of his war days, was trying to egg my friend on to a sham battle, trying to get him to dogfight.

He saw the DH, which was a mail ship of those days, approach him first from above and head on. He had to kick out of the way at the last moment, or he would have been hit on that first pass the guy took at him. The guy pulled up and took another pass at him. He kicked out of the way again and started wondering since when had they turned lunatics loose in the sky. He didn't have much time for wondering, because the guy kept taking passes at him. Finally, the guy took to diving down under him and pulling up in front of him. He seemed to think that was more fun than just diving on my friend, and he kept it up.

My friend saw him disappear under the tail of his ship this time, and he didn't know what to do about it. He didn't know which way to turn, because he didn't know which way the goof was going to pull up.

Suddenly he saw the nose of the other ship. It came up directly in front of his own nose. He knew the guy had overdone it this time and come too close. He pulled back on his stick, but felt the jar of the collision just as he did. It threw him up into a stall, and when he came out his motor was so rough he had to cut his switches. He had raked the tail of the other ship with his propeller, and it was bent all out of shape. He had also cut the tail off the drunk's ship.

The drunk was evidently too drunk to get out of the cockpit because he cracked up with his ship. My friend managed to get his ship down without jumping. It was only a wonder, plus some neat flying on my friend's part, that he wasn't killed too.

BUILDING THROUGH

A pilot should never be too stubborn with an airplane. I learned that early, fortunately, without coming to grief in the process.

Another pilot criticized my flying once. He criticized the way I was making my take-offs. Kidlike and cocky, just out of flying school, I took a foolish way of proving he was wrong. But he had me so riled by his caustic and nasty remarks about how I was going to kill myself if I kept that up that I flung out a challenge to him and felt I had to keep my attitude even when I saw I was overdoing the thing and thought I was going to crack up.

"If you think my take-offs are so dangerous," I told him, "I'll just go out there and cut my gun in the most dangerous spot of this dangerous take-off and land safely back in the airport." And I stalked out, fuming, and got in the ship.

I took off toward the high trees at the end of the field, didn't let the ship climb very steeply approaching the trees, and banked just before I got to them--exactly like I had been doing on the take-offs he had been criticizing. But I also pulled up sharply, just to make it worse. I didn't want him to have any comeback. I cut the gun and started dropping back in over the trees into the airport. I should have put the nose down a little to cushion the drop, but I was mad. I'd show him the worse way. I wanted to gun it because I was dropping hard, but I wouldn't give him the satisfaction.

I hit like a ton of bricks. The ship groaned and bounced as high as a hangar. Luckily, it was a square hit and a square bounce. That's the only reason I didn't spread the ship all over the field. It hit and bounced again and rolled to a very short stop for a down-wind landing.

"All right," I told the guy when I crawled out of the ship, "you go out now and cut your gun just over the trees on one of your safe, straight take-offs. You won't have a turn started and already pretty well developed, and you won't have room enough to start one. You'll pile into the trees in a heap, and if that's safer than landing on the airport in one piece, then I'll admit that your take-offs are safer than mine."

He didn't dare and he knew it. So he just glared at me, knowing damned well, as I knew myself, that I should by all rights have cracked up on that landing. But I had him, and he shut up and didn't make any more cracks about me.

MUCH!

Somebody asked me one day what kind of an airplane I flew. I told him any kind anybody was willing to pay me for flying.

"But don't you own an airplane?" the man asked.

"No," I answered. "And furthermore," I added, "I have never owned an airplane, although I have been a professional pilot for eleven years."

Why?

Well, I can best explain that as I explained it to a little boy once out in California.

I was at the Lockheed factory. I had been there several months, supervising the construction of an airplane I had sold to a rich sportsman pilot in the East. It was a Lockheed Sirius plane and at that time a ship which was taking everybody's eyes as the latest and sleekest thing yet developed by the engineers. Lindbergh had just popularized it by flying himself and his wife across the country in it and establishing a new transcontinental record.

They rolled my ship out on the line one bright, sunny day and I must say that in its shiny new red-and-white paint job and its clean, sweeping lines it certainly was a beautiful sight sitting there glistening in that California sunshine.

A little boy who had crawled over the factory fence despite the "No Trespassing" sign evidently thought so too, for he was standing there gazing raptly at it with eyes as big as silver dollars when I stalked out toward the ship to make a first test hop in it. He intercepted me neatly as I rounded the wing tip and approached the cockpit.

"Ooh, mister," he said, "do you own that ship?"

"No, sonny," I answered. "I merely fly it. I find that that is less expensive and more fun."

CROSS-COUNTRY SNAPSHOTS

I take off from March Field, Calif., head north and climb steeply. At ten thousand feet on the altimeter I see the green fir trees skimming only a couple of hundred feet beneath me. I see the deep snow between their trunks, brilliant in the sun. I am clearing the San Bernardino range.

I come out at ten thousand feet over the Mohave Desert, my altimeter still reading ten thousand feet. The floor of the Mohave is high.

I look ahead to the railroad, thirty miles away. I look behind. The green-sloped, snow-capped Bernardinoes form a backdrop for the desert underneath.

On beyond the railroad, beyond Barstow, into the Granite Mountains, low, rolling, black, barren, lava-formed.

Into the Painted Hills. They are not named that on the map. They are not named at all, and at first I can't believe them. But there they are beneath me. No atmospheric trick. No effect of distance. No subtle color either. They are really painted. There is one over there. It sweeps out of the desert upward into green and ends in a peak of white. There is another, sweeping through purple to red. Others through red to yellow. It is as if God had been playing with colored chalks, picking up purple, perhaps, powdering it through his fingers to drop in a purple heap, picking up another color then to drop on top of that in powdered brilliance, powdering then on top of that another color still to form a brilliant, pointed tip. Fantastic, unreal, true!

For a long time now I have seen no life. The brilliant land is barren. I look back. I can still make out where the railroad runs. Far, far behind, the white Bernardinoes rise, low on the horizon now in the distance. It is not a long flight back to the railroad, or even a very long one back to the mountains and over them into the green San Bernardino Valley and March Field. But it is a long walk. It is a long walk back even to the railroad. What if my motor quits? I had intended to go on to Death Valley, just to see it, circle, and return.

I bank reluctantly around and assume a reverse compass course for home. I have seen enough for an afternoon's jaunt, anyway.

REMINISCENCE

I taxi out and turn my ship into the wind at the end of the snow-plowed runway at Hagerstown Airport, Maryland. The white hangar looms too close. Deep snow on the rest of the field prohibits its use. Can I get over the hangar? I give it the gun and try. Just miss the hangar. Too close!

Head off on a compass course for New York. Strong drift to the right from northwest wind. Head a little more to left.

Blue Ridge Mountains pass under me. On into the friendly undulating valley country beyond, snow covered.

Gettysburg under my left wing. They were fighting down there once. Hard to believe, looking down on the peaceful fields now. Wonder what they would have done if they could have looked up and seen me and my airplane?

Low hills before the Susquehanna River. Their brown contours reach like dusky fingers out into the snow-filled valleys.

Over the river, and Lancaster off to my left. Reform school there. That's where they were always going to send me when I was a bad little boy.

More valley country. Ridge-like hills. The Schuylkill River and Norristown. Philadelphia, blue laws, and no movies on Sundays far off to my right.

More valley. The Delaware River. Washington crossed the Delaware. I cross it in half a minute.

The Sourland Mountains and Lindbergh's sad white house. I see Flemington and know the trial is going on down there. I remember walking with Lindbergh, ten years ago, from San Antonio, Tex., to Kelly Field, where we were both advanced flying students. "What are you going to do when you graduate?" he asked. "What are you going to do?" I asked him. Yes, what were we going to do? And now he was down there in that courtroom, and the world stretching out around him as far as I could see and much, much farther was a cocked ear listening again to his tragedy. And I was circling above in the clean blue sky, remembering many things and thinking.

I shuddered a last long unbelieving look at Lindbergh's empty, lonely house, perched up on its hill, circled and flew on. Half an hour later, on Long Island, I kissed the chubby cheek of my own first-born son in greeting and pitied Lindbergh somewhat for his fame.

MEXICAN WHOOPEE!

I hadn't seen Darr Alkire since I had resigned from the army several years before, so when I dropped into March Field, Calif., to say hello and he told me that he and a couple of the other officers were flying three ships down to Mexacali on the Mexican border that afternoon to return the next and asked me to go along, I said yes.

I flew down in the rear seat of Darr's ship, and when we landed and crossed the border everybody proceeded to get drunk. Everybody but Yours Truly. I had been on a party the night before I had dropped in to see Darr and didn't feel up to it.

The next morning we met a Mexican captain, and everybody had to drink a lot of drinks to each other. I still threw mine over my shoulder.

That afternoon the Mexican captain had to escort us to the airport, just to say good-bye to us. The leader of our formation then, no sooner had we taken off, had to lead us in some diving passes at the Mexican captain, just to say good-bye to him.

They were having a lot of fun dusting their wings on the airport, saluting the captain, but I wasn't! Darr was sticking his wing in too close to the leader's for comfort. I had a set of dual controls in the rear cockpit and couldn't resist just a little pressure on them to ease his wing away from the leader's in some of the passes or to pull him up just a little sooner in some of the dives. It was a heluva breach of flying ethics, but after all I was sober!

We got back to March, and Darr, sobered by then, began telling me what a swell guy I had been to sit back there and take it. He said he would have taken the controls away from me, had I been flying drunk, and he sitting back there sober. I thought he was razzing me for a moment, but saw that he really meant it. My pressure on the controls had been so subtle that he hadn't noticed it.

I didn't bother to tell him the truth. I liked the idea that he thought I had had enough sand to sit there and not interfere with him. I didn't have enough nerve to set him straight on the matter.

IT'S A TOUGH RACKET

The hazards of a pilot's life are sometimes different than some people suppose.

For instance, I flew some people to a ranch in Mexico once. I fought bad weather most of the way from New York to Eagle Pass on the Border, skimming mountains and swamps, and then flew eighty miles of barren mountain and desert country to the ranch house.

They insisted the next day that I go out hunting with them. That meant that I had to ride a horse. I had ridden a horse once before in my life and remembered it as the most uncomfortable means of transportation ever invented by man.

But I went with them. I even began to like it after we had been out a while. I discovered that you could wheel the horse around in a running turn and that it was almost like banking an airplane around. I was having pretty good fun experimenting until I noticed that a certain portion of my anatomy was getting very warm, and then, soon, that it was getting very tender. Pretty soon I began to think that we would never get back to the ranch house. When we finally did, my pants and my anatomy were brilliantly discolored. And when I went to take the pants off, I noticed that quite a bond had developed between me and them, quite an attachment indeed! They were stuck fast and could be persuaded away from me only with their pound of flesh.

I decided that I would stick to my airplane after that. But the next day, I discovered that my airplane was uncomfortable too--and I had to make a five-hour flight to Mexico City.

When I got to Mexico City everything was uncomfortable, and I had to eat my dinner off the mantelpiece that night. There was an additional humiliation. The doctor had to undress me. He had to use plenty of hot oil and go very easy.

ALMOST

Bunny had trusted me on the outward trip, so now, returning to March Field, Calif., I comforted myself in the rear cockpit of our army DH with the thought that Bunny could fly as well as I.

San Francisco lay behind us. The Diablo Mountains were beneath. Snug around us, familiar and friendly, was our ship.

But beyond, strange and ominous by now to Bunny and me because we had hardly ever flown in it before, and never for so long, stretched like a white, opaque, and directionless night the fog.

The ship felt as if it were flying straight, but when I peeked over Bunny's shoulder I saw the needle on his bank and turn indicator leaning halfway over to the right. I watched it start back then--Bunny was all right--to the center. But slowly then, inexorably--Bunny! Bunny!--the needle leaned over to the left. The ball was centered, so the turns were good. But that was not enough. Where were we going? Were we weaving? Circling? Which way were we turning mostly? The ocean was not far off to our right.

Then something else--ice! Its white hands gripped the front of wings, the leading edge of struts and wires. The prop got rough. The motor beat and strained. Once the ship shivered. I saw one aileron go down. Bunny was trying to hold a wing up. I saw the needle straighten. He had held it. But I saw something else too! I saw the altimeter losing. No hope for blue sky now. No hope to ride on top until we found a hole, as our weather report had indicated that we would. How far were the mountain tops beneath us? Would the ice melt off before we sank too far?

I saw the throttle moving backward, heard the motor taper off its friendly roar, heard Bunny's voice sound out like thunder in white doom.

"Let's jump," he shouted, turning his head halfway.

Were there mountains to land on and walk on in the depths of that white down there? Or had we circled out over the ocean?

"Let's not. Let's wait. Let's try once more," I shouted back.

Then I shouted again, scraped my fingers on the windshield, reaching, grabbed Bunny's shoulder, but too late. Even as I shouted, reached, and grabbed, the ship banked on its ear, wheeled over, and dove safely through a brown passage tunnel to the earth. Bunny had seen it too--a hole in the fog, and through it, ground.

The warmer lower air flowed over us. The ice dripped from our wings in glistening drops. We came out in the San Joaquin Valley with plenty of ceiling, and it was plain sailing from there on.

RUN! RUN! RUN!

It is a bright, golden day in Texas. A little Mexican boy is working in a field of sugar cane just back of Kelly Field. The airplanes from the field are droning in the sleepy air above his head. Occasionally he pauses in his work to glance half curiously at one of them. He is not much interested in them. They are like the automobiles swishing endlessly past on the highway near by. He is accustomed to them. And besides, they are not of his world.

Sometimes the long motor roar of a ship coming out of a dive attracts his half-hearted attention. Occasionally an intricate formation maneuver over his head warrants his momentary gaze. Often he stares, half abstractedly, skyward while he works. Like a shoe cobbler in a window watching the crowds passing in the street.

This time, however, a curious interruption in the steady beating drone of a three-ship formation of DHs passing over him makes him involuntarily raise his head from his work. It is a strange sound, somehow ominous to him. He is accustomed to hearing the motors run. Even their tapering off for a landing is a different noise than this one. His unknowingly trained ears and maybe some strange premonition tell him that.

He sees two of the three ships locked together in collision. He sees them, startlingly silent and arrested in their flight, falling in their own debris. He sees two black objects leave the wrecks. He sees a white streamer trail out behind each of them and then blossom open into two swinging, slowly floating parachutes. He stands with his head thrown back, his Indian eyes rapt in his Asiatic face.

Suddenly he is alarmed, then full of fear. The two milling wrecks, black harbingers of doom by now, are going to fall on him. He begins to run. Any way, any direction at all. He runs as fast as his little brown legs will carry him. He covers a considerable distance from where he was standing by the time the wrecks hit.

The spot he runs from, unruffled, undisturbed, lies warming, sleeping in the sun. The wrecks don't hit that spot. They hit him, running.

The world that was not his has folded darkened crumpled wings of death around him.

HIGH FIGHT

One of the briefest and most amusing family fights I have ever listened in on occurred in an airplane. I was flying its owner and his wife to the coast.

We came in over the Mohave Desert, crossed the mountains at the desert's western edge, and started out over the valley, where I knew Los Angeles lay thirteen thousand feet beneath us. The valley and the ocean beyond were covered with fog, and I could see nothing but the white, billowed stretch of it and the tawny mountains rising out of it behind us.

I spiraled down and went through a hole in the fog near the foot of the mountains. It was lower and thicker underneath than I had hoped. I picked up a railroad and started weaving my way along it into the airport.

The owner of the ship, sitting on my right, was helping me with my map, holding it for me. His wife, sitting behind me, was squirming anxiously in her seat and peering tensely out of the windows through the low mists.

Soon she tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Aren't we flying awfully low?"

I half turned my head and shouted, "Yes, the ceiling is awfully low." I wanted to add, "You fool," but didn't dare.

"Isn't it dangerous?" she whined.

"We're all right," I shouted. "I've flown stuff like this before. I can handle it."

Pretty soon she tapped me on the shoulder again. "Where are we?" she inquired.

"I can't tell you the exact spot," I shouted, "but we are still on the right railroad and will be coming into the airport in a few minutes."

We passed over a town section just then, and the railroad branched three ways under us. I made a quick jump at my map to check which of the three I should follow. The wife saw me jump and must have seen that I looked worried. She tapped me on the shoulder again.

"Oh, are you sure we are going the right way?" she whimpered.

I started to turn around to explain to her what I was doing and why, realized my flying required all my attention right then, cast an appealing glance at her husband, clamped my jaws tight, and started studying landmarks. We were in close to the airport, and I didn't want to miss it.

I heard the husband shout one of the funniest mixtures of supplication and command I have ever heard.

"Now listen, honey," he shouted at her. "You keep your damn mouth shut, sweetheart."

GESTURE AT REUNIONS

It is the year before Lindbergh becomes famous. I have graduated in the same class with him from the army flying school the year before and have seen him only twice since. I am on an army cross-country trip, bound for St. Louis, when I land at Chicago and run into him. He is just taking off with the mail, bound for St. Louis too, and we decide to fly down together in formation.

It is getting dark when we sight the river at St. Louis in the distance. Lindbergh shakes his wings. He is calling my attention. I pull my ship in close to his. I see him pointing from his cockpit. I look ahead and see a speck. It grows rapidly larger. I make it out as another DH approaching us head on from the deepening dusk. It comes up, swings around into formation with us, and sticks its wing right up into mine. Its pilot peers at me, and I peer at him. We recognize each other. It is Red Love. Red, Lindbergh, and myself were three of the four cadets in our pursuit class at flying school. Looks like a class reunion in the air.

But no. Lindbergh is shaking his wings. He is banking. He is pointing down. He spirals down, circles a field, flies low over it several times, dragging it, looking it over carefully, and lands. Red and I follow.

Lindbergh and I crawl out of our ships with parachutes strapped to us. Red crawls out of his without one. Lindbergh takes his off as the three of us converge for greetings.

"You will need this getting the mail on into Chicago the rest of the way in the dark tonight," he says to Red, holding the chute out to him.

"It's the only one in the company," he says, turning, explaining to me, "and I won't need it for the few miles on into St. Louis from here."

We say hasty greetings and good-byes, crawl back into our still idling ships, and take off. Lindbergh, chuteless now, heads off south for St. Louis, and I follow. Red swings off in the opposite direction for Chicago.

I look back. I see Red disappearing into the darkening north. I know he feels better now, sitting on that chute.

AS I SAW IT

I had to go to Cleveland to bring back a ship that a student of mine had left there in bad weather. I got on an airliner, with a parachute. The chute was for use on the way back.

The airline porter wanted to put my chute in the baggage compartment. My argument was: "What good would it do me there?" The porter looked offended, but I kept my attitude and took my chute to my seat with me.

We took off from Newark after dark. The weather was bad, and we went blind three minutes after we took off.

I tried to console myself with the thought that the pilots were specially trained in blind flying, that they had instruments, had two motors, had radio, that everything was just ducky. But I couldn't even see the wing tips.

I tried to read my magazine. I found myself peering out of the windows through the darkness to see if we had come out on top yet.

I tried to nap. I found myself hearing the motors getting slightly louder, knowing we were nosing down; feeling myself getting slightly heavier in my seat, knowing the pilot was correcting; hearing the motors begin to labor slightly, knowing we were nosing up; feeling myself getting ever so slightly lighter in my seat, knowing the pilot was correcting again; telling myself repeatedly that he knew his stuff and that there wasn't anything I could do about it anyway, but sitting there going through every motion with him just the same.

Two hours later we were still blind, and my nose was pressing up against the windowpane almost constantly. The other passengers probably thought I had never been in a ship before.

Half an hour later we were still blind and only half an hour out of Cleveland. We broke out of the stuff finally just outside of Cleveland. We were flying low, and the lights were still going dim under us as we skimmed along not very far above them. There wasn't much ceiling when we landed, and it closed in shortly after that.

Most of the passengers roused themselves from sleep when we landed. I was plenty wide awake. I knew that ship hadn't had much gas range. If we had got stuck, we would have had to come down someway before very long. If those passengers could have read my mind, or I think even the pilot's, there probably would have been a battle in the cabin over my chute.

WAS MY FACE RED!

I took off at Buffalo one time to do a test job. I had been called up there as an expert and was supposed to be pretty hot stuff.

I took the ship off and started rocking it violently from side to side. I kept this up through a variety of speed ranges, watching the ailerons closely all the time. I wanted to find out first of all if the ailerons had any tendency to flutter under a high angle of attack condition. Then I began horsing on the stick to see if anything unusual happened to the ailerons when I introduced the high angle of attack condition that way.

I interrupted my observations of the ship's behavior after a while to look around for the airport. I couldn't find it! I had forgotten that I was in a high-speed ship and could get far away from the field in a very short time. Furthermore, the country was unfamiliar to me, and I had no map. Gee, if I had only thought to stick a map in the ship before I took off.

I knew the airport was somewhere on the west side of town. I thought it was somewhat north. But how far north I didn't know. I couldn't remember even if it was close in to town or far out. I had a vague idea it was far out, but how far out I didn't know. If I had only thought to bring a map! Or if I had only kept the airport in sight. Good old hindsight!

I was panic-stricken. There I was, a supposedly high-powered test pilot, lost over the airport. What a dumb position for me to be in!

Before I found the airport by just cruising around looking haphazardly for it, I might be forced down by the weather, which was none too good and getting worse, or I might run out of gas. What if I was finally forced to pick a strange field, a pasture or something, and cracked up getting into it? How would I explain that?

I decided to cruise north and south, up and down, in ten- or fifteen-mile laps, starting far enough out of town to be sure to fly over the airport on one of the laps as I moved closer in on each one. That would be at least an orderly procedure.

I found the field on my fourth lap. But was I in a sweat! And did I keep my eye on that field after that!

CO-PILOT

Dick Blythe, who handled Lindbergh's publicity not only after Lindbergh came back from Paris but also, as Dick stated to me, just before Lindbergh went to Paris, is a bit of aviation folklore in himself.

I just ran into Dick over at the Roosevelt Field restaurant, and he told me this one about Dean Smith. Dean is one of the oldest air-mail pilots. He started flying the mail 'way back in the postoffice days, just after the war. He is a lean six-foot-two, easy-going guy who would never talk much about his flying.

Dick caught him just after he had returned from one of his crackups in the Alleghanies in the old days when Roosevelt Field was called Curtiss Field and the mail went out of there instead of out of Newark as it does now. Dean was just pouring his long self into the cockpit of another DH to take the night mail out again.

"Where in the hell have you been?" Dick greeted him.

"Oh," Dean said, "I had a hell of a time the other night. Just got back."

"What happened?" Dick asked him.